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ivyficI am apparently on a modern war movie kick. I've always hated war films--I blame this on being shown The Train and The Great Escape at a young age. And as entertainment I still don't like them. But as a way of culturally processing the experience of war, I do. Hurt Locker I already posted about.
Jarhead - I read a review of this that said the movie was a failure because it wasn't a "real" war movie. That is, it didn't follow the accepted narrative of someone going to war and being forever changed by their experiences (a la All Quiet on the Western Front). It's kind of hilarious to invalidate this movie as "not real," though, given that it's based on a real memoir of a real soldier in a real war.
This is what the movie is: A twenty-year-old who failed out of college joins the Marines cause he doesn't have any other options, really. He hates it. Boot camp is terrible. He gets deployed to Saudi Arabia for Desert Shield. He hates it. They have nothing to do. They are in the desert for six months going slowly nuts from boredom and running pointless drills. Then war is declared, with expectations that there will be 30,000 American casualties, that they will see action. Instead what happens is they march a lot, see some dead bodies, and hear the war happening in the distance. Then, after four days, it is over. And Swofford, our main character, looks at his rifle morosely and laments that he didn't even get to fire it.
It's a movie about being told that all the suffering you went through in boot camp was necessary because it made you something special, something elite, something valuable--a scout sniper. Only to go to war and discover that snipers have no place in this war. This war is fought with planes. Swofford gets sent on one mission, that is (spoiler!) called off before he pulls the trigger, leading his spotter to throw an epic hissy fit that he didn't get to kill ONE PERSON in this whole thing.
I don't think it's meant to be a statement about bloodthirstiness, but more about what is the point of everything they went through to become good at killing if they never kill anyone? It's a movie about futility.
At the end of the film, Swofford's staff sergeant sits down with him and says that he could be home selling cars, living in a nice house with his wife, but he doesn't do that because he loves this job. He thanks god for every day he's in the Corps. Then he looks out at the burning oil fields and says wondrously, "Who else gets to see this stuff?" In any other war film, this would be the moment where the soldier understands the purpose to everything that's happened, and learns to see his superior as a peer, to understand why he does what he does. (I point you to Starship Troopers, the book, as archetypical in this respect.)
In this film, Swofford looks at his staff sergeant like he's fucking nuts. And from everything we've seen, we, the audience, have to agree.
At the end of the film, they arrive home and a Vietnam vet greets them. And there's a moment where you can tell there's supposed to be a shared camaraderie--we are all Marines, we are all warriors--but Swofford looks at this guy and sees nothing even remotely in common with what he just went through.
So no, this is not a war movie about the horrors of war, or about how it changes men. It's a movie about the stupid pointlessness of it. From one soldier's perspective, in one war, and for that, I have to applaud it as part of the Hollywood war film canon.
Jarhead - I read a review of this that said the movie was a failure because it wasn't a "real" war movie. That is, it didn't follow the accepted narrative of someone going to war and being forever changed by their experiences (a la All Quiet on the Western Front). It's kind of hilarious to invalidate this movie as "not real," though, given that it's based on a real memoir of a real soldier in a real war.
This is what the movie is: A twenty-year-old who failed out of college joins the Marines cause he doesn't have any other options, really. He hates it. Boot camp is terrible. He gets deployed to Saudi Arabia for Desert Shield. He hates it. They have nothing to do. They are in the desert for six months going slowly nuts from boredom and running pointless drills. Then war is declared, with expectations that there will be 30,000 American casualties, that they will see action. Instead what happens is they march a lot, see some dead bodies, and hear the war happening in the distance. Then, after four days, it is over. And Swofford, our main character, looks at his rifle morosely and laments that he didn't even get to fire it.
It's a movie about being told that all the suffering you went through in boot camp was necessary because it made you something special, something elite, something valuable--a scout sniper. Only to go to war and discover that snipers have no place in this war. This war is fought with planes. Swofford gets sent on one mission, that is (spoiler!) called off before he pulls the trigger, leading his spotter to throw an epic hissy fit that he didn't get to kill ONE PERSON in this whole thing.
I don't think it's meant to be a statement about bloodthirstiness, but more about what is the point of everything they went through to become good at killing if they never kill anyone? It's a movie about futility.
At the end of the film, Swofford's staff sergeant sits down with him and says that he could be home selling cars, living in a nice house with his wife, but he doesn't do that because he loves this job. He thanks god for every day he's in the Corps. Then he looks out at the burning oil fields and says wondrously, "Who else gets to see this stuff?" In any other war film, this would be the moment where the soldier understands the purpose to everything that's happened, and learns to see his superior as a peer, to understand why he does what he does. (I point you to Starship Troopers, the book, as archetypical in this respect.)
In this film, Swofford looks at his staff sergeant like he's fucking nuts. And from everything we've seen, we, the audience, have to agree.
At the end of the film, they arrive home and a Vietnam vet greets them. And there's a moment where you can tell there's supposed to be a shared camaraderie--we are all Marines, we are all warriors--but Swofford looks at this guy and sees nothing even remotely in common with what he just went through.
So no, this is not a war movie about the horrors of war, or about how it changes men. It's a movie about the stupid pointlessness of it. From one soldier's perspective, in one war, and for that, I have to applaud it as part of the Hollywood war film canon.
no subject
Date: 2013-01-18 12:27 am (UTC)The Adrian Lyne film Jacob's Ladder is an interesting, strange film, if you are on a Vietnam-themed movie binge.
Band of Brothers is excellent. Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line is not a typical war film, and some of the images are amazing.
no subject
Date: 2013-01-18 01:51 am (UTC)